Stop & Shop Agrees to Pay Tisbury $1.16 Million in Mitigation Money

Tisbury selectmen took center stage this week in Stop & Shop’s bid to enlarge its Vineyard Haven store with the announcement that the grocery chain has agreed to make a large payment to the town to offset the impacts of the proposed expansion.

Stop & Shop has agreed to pay a total of $1.165 million through a combination of one-time and long-term cash donations to the town, according to a draft memorandum released by the selectmen following an executive session Tuesday. The donations are for traffic mitigation, affordable housing and renovation of the town comfort station, among other things.

For its part, the town has agreed to support the expansion plan before the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and work cooperatively with Stop & Shop on other issues.

Town parking lot abutting store has been subject of interest.
— Ivy Ashe

“I’m happy to report that we have reached [an agreement],” selectman and board chairman Jeffrey Kristal said after he and selectman Jon Snyder reconvened the public portion of the selectmen’s meeting. Selectman Tristan Israel was en route back to the Island from vacation and did not attend. Geoghan Coogan, a Tisbury attorney who represents Stop & Shop on the project, thanked the two selectmen.

The memorandum has not yet been signed and is expected to be discussed at another meeting Tuesday.

Mr. Israel told the Gazette Thursday that he was unhappy to see his board take action on the matter in his absence. “I’m disappointed the board chose to deal with this while I was away,” he said. “I will reserve most of my comments for Tuesday.”

The memorandum adds a new twist to the increasingly tangled story of the grocery store expansion plans which are under review by the commission as a development of regional impact (DRI). A public hearing that opened before the MVC nine months ago has been continued seven times, with another session now set for May 1. Size and scale of the large building and parking garage envisioned by Stop & Shop, traffic impacts at the notoriously congested Five Corners intersection and the fate of a historic house on Cromwell Lane have all been issues for discussion.

Another issue has involved the town parking lot that abuts the Water street grocery store, but discussion on that topic has migrated from the town to the commission and back to the town. Commission executive director Mark London has said more than once that the parking lot issues are between the town and Stop & Shop and are not in front of the commission.

A town committee, appointed to come up with a new design concept for the parking lot in light of the Stop & Shop expansion, approved a plan last month. Meanwhile, Tisbury leaders and Stop & Shop have been involved in separate talks, both in public and behind closed doors. Then two weeks ago at a hearing before the MVC, Mr. Coogan said Stop & Shop had received a letter from the town that was a potential game changer for the plan. He did not disclose details and the letter has not been made public. But disclosure of the letter caused the commission to postpone its hearing once more, to the April 17 date.

Speaking to the Gazette on Wednesday this week Mr. Coogan and Greg O’Brien, a communications consultant for Stop & Shop, said the draft memorandum is an outgrowth of the letter.

“That [letter] requested a certain mitigation package that was not feasible for Stop & Shop and we negotiated an agreement from there,” Mr. Coogan said. He said the negotiations involved the Tisbury town counsel and town administrator John (Jay) Grande. “I met them once, spoke to them, we probably emailed each other,” Mr. Coogan said. He said he had also spoken to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission attorney, “because this is a three-party agreement.

“It’s part of an overall process and I think most of the public doesn’t understand how the process works,” Mr. Coogan added. “This has another angle to it in that the town is involved. It’s different. It’s still an MVC project but it’s got another player involved — that’s hard for people to understand and get their head around I understand that.”

Mr. O’Brien said the memorandum, once signed, will be incorporated into a final offer from Stop & Shop to the MVC.

“This deal with the town is going to go to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission,” he said.

Stop & Shop needs a vote of approval from the commission in order to go forward with its plan.

The $1.16 million financial commitment agreed to by Stop & Shop in the memorandum goes far beyond the parking lot issue and is broken down into a series of short and long-term cash donations, most of them for affordable housing and traffic mitigation. The payments are a condition for obtaining building and occupancy permits. They include:

• A one-time donation of $100,000 to the Tisbury affordable housing trust, plus $10,000 a year for 10 years to the trust.

• A one-time donation of $150,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Martha’s Vineyard.

• A $250,000 donation to the town for deposit into a fund to be established by the town for “so-called downtown traffic mitigation issues.”

• $40,000 a year for 10 years to the town for beautification ($10,000), and traffic mitigation ($30,000).

In addition to the $1.165 million, Stop & Shop also has agreed to:

• Save and arrange for moving the historic house on Cromwell Lane;

• Pay $165,000 for the renovation and upgrade of the town comfort station;

• Assume responsibility for general maintenance in the town parking lot that abuts the store;

• Prepare a detailed construction management plan that addresses every phase of construction.

The town has agreed to:

• Support the project before the Martha’s Vineyard Commission;

• Keep Norton Lane open to traffic;

• Allow Stop & Shop to build a sidewalk along Water street near the front of the store;

• Allow Stop & Shop to use part of the parking lot for staging during construction, and to work cooperatively on landscape and design issues.

Mr. Coogan said he plans to ask on April 17 for another extension of the MVC hearing, but only because two commissioners have said they are unable to be present.

And he emphasized that Stop & Shop did not ask for the town’s written commitment to support the expansion plan. “That part of the memorandum I didn’t ask for, I can tell you that,” Mr. Coogan said. “We did not ask for that as a condition to the agreement. It’s not to say we haven’t been looking for their support for months. When town counsel sent the draft over, it was in there.”

And this million-dollar-plus payment will mitigate the traffic problem....how? Or are we just sending the message that blatant payoffs (and/or blackmail) are appropriate, as long as it's done through a government office? At one point will a court find that the total lack of a nexus between a "mitigation payment" and actually providing mitigation of identified problems is legal?

Extortion!! The selectman should be ashamed of themselves. Outrageous! More affordable housing.... Enough with affordable housing. Stop and shop will just pass the cost on to the consumer..
Funny how no one talk about the success of Morgan woods.. It is a disaster.

Something that was not mentioned and maybe we forgot,nobnocket project and the millions that was spent on traffic studies.so we are now going to have to suck it up were it is,I remember No Nobnocket very well and the campaign to stop it and they did,so for the ones that are complaining were it is going to bad we had our chance to move it out of town some years ago,and let's face it it's only for a few months were trafic is bad,shop early or stay away from 5 corners during those months,we need more stores to keep prices down.Simple Math.

This is shady. As a former Town Planner, my advice to the residents of Tisbury is to demand to know where that $1.16 Million is going. That money is the Town's money, not the Selectmen's (there's a difference - this isn't meant to go into the General Fund, it should be going to the Highway Improvement/Roadway fund, etc.). There has to be some agreement that stipulates what the funding is to be used for - look for it in the Notice of Decision from the MVC if it is included in that - and it has to be used in conjunction with some aspect of the project. It's not unusual for a developer to pay the cost of installing traffic mitigation devices (lights, improved roadways, etc.) on behalf of the Town, or to pay for the Town to do so, but funding needs to be tied to a specific item(s) that is related to the development. Otherwise, it is simply a payoff from the developer to the Town, or a means of extorting money from developers by the Town. Laws exist to keep this from happening. Mitigation funding isn't new, but remember, this project is being permitted through the MVC, not the Town. Make sure the MVC isn't getting any of the Town's money.

In the March 20 MVC hearing, Stop & Shop was willing to pay for affordable housing and bus passes for employees, moving the historic building on Cromwell Lane, and quite a number of other things, but traffic mitigation was the major concern on everybody's mind. It's in their interest to help fix it because if no one can or wants to drive to their store their investment won't do them much good. The only real solution to 5 corners traffic is to move boat traffic (cars and trucks) down harbor beyond Packer's tanks, and keep just foot traffic at the present slips. To meet the new floodplain zoning requirement, the SSA is going to have to raise their building up 11 feet like everyone else down there, anyway, so do two stages.
Parking is a related problem. I heard the comment that many employees of all town businesses do the parking lot shuffle all day to avoid a ticket. More should ride the VTA to work. And if the schedule doesn't work for you, write to them and tell them what would work. Angie Grant, the VTA Administrator, was at that hearing, and she told me they want more of that information to help them in August when they work out the schedules for the coming year. In her comment at the hearing, she said failure to deal with 5 corners traffic effectively could destroy the VTA. If traffic is bottled up at 5 corners, and buses are thrown off schedule, their core ridership may decide VTA as not working for them and go back to driving. The relationship of VTA ridership to revenue is linear: if the number of riders goes down, revenue goes down; without money, service will deteriorate, leading to further abandonment. VTA has been an Island-grown initiative from the start, and we need to support it.

Are these comments from people that haven't been to the Tisbury BOS and MVC meetings. If so, know there is still a lot that you can do before the MVC April 17th meeting. Write, e-mail or stop by and tell your concerns to the MVC Directer Mark London(london@mvcommission.org). Then go to the meeting on the 17th (MVC Calendar http://www.mvcommission.org/calendar.html) and voice out what you said here!
I agree that this "Memorandum of Agreement" with the Town of Tisbury is a farce.
Months ago this, side door, money talk noted in the "Memorandum of Agreement" now amounts to less than what milled about then.
Taking that into consideration. Note that the "Ahold" group (based in the Netherlands), of which S&S is a part, made over a billion dollars last year in profit (FYI you can look this up on line) ........... That makes the $1.165 million offer look like a grain of sand on the beach. All told this is NOT a significant amount of money to mitigate the impacts the proposed store will ultimately bring.
Take a nominal amount of time and read the correspondences. (March 20, http://www.mvcommission.org/doc.php/DRI%2089-M3%20Stop%20Shop%20Correspondence%20List%202013-11-19.pdf?id=4785)
There are a lot of concerned islanders, neighbors and unbiased professionals like yourselves, out there voicing what those negative impacts would/will ultimately produce.
Then think about, other than food and minimum waged jobs, what benefits will this size S&S bring to the town.
Will it attract more shoppers to Main St. or discourage them since the S&S would dominate the parking in down town Tisbury? And note that a 30,000 sq ft store needs a client base of 80,000 plus.
Next, check out this web site below these Stop & Shop stores were just shut down in 2013. The underlying issues was they were not profitable. Did they not have the extensive client base needed for their area, forcing people to drive further away to another store?
https://www.ahold.com/media/ahold-usa.htm#!/Media/Stop-Shop-announces-store-closings-in-New-Hampshire.htm
A New Store yes, but it is the Wrong size in the wrong place for the village of Tisbury.
Speak up and speak out!

There are a few items that are pretty suspicious. When the S.S.A. pays the town for traffic mitigation or whatever it is they pay the town of Tisbury for, the town uses the funds very creatively. So there are some items like these... "A $250,000 donation to the town for deposit into a fund to be established by the town for “so-called downtown traffic mitigation issues.” • $40,000 a year for 10 years to the town for beautification ($10,000), and traffic mitigation ($30,000) - that kind of raise questions. "So called... etc. etc." What does that mean. And $10,000 a year for beautification plus $30,000 a year for traffic mitigation - really? What will that money go to? The town can not manage Beach Road, and they want money for five corners? Is this going to go to put a cop at five corners to direct (ahem) traffic? And then there was the part of the agreement that the town attorney (and who might that be) who gratituously added in the clause that in exchange for this money the town would support the project before the Martha's Vineyard Commission. So who is this attorney? Why would any attorney do such a thing in this kind of an agreement? It feels as though he was directed to put this in by the selectmen and that he must have objected to it, but did it anyway. Or maybe not. Where did this come from? And as to the suggestion that the town should perhaps put the freight boats at the end of the Packer land, does the Gazette not know that this land is in contention and being reviewed by attorneys because there is the claim that the land was donated to the town long ago? It all is related somehow - where to put the traffic, who owns what, climate change, flooding, where does the money go...all of that.

What, Jeff Kristal and Jonathon Snyder, Tisbury Selectmen, waited til Tristan Israel was out of town to vote on this Stop and Shop deal? I smell a rat. Was attorney Coogan in on this? Then it follows that perhaps we should try for a million or two from the SSA for the new freight boat for the exact same reasons? Let's just keep going with more and bigger magnets to draw lots of vehicles to five corners. Let's not mention that the Stop and Shop has not reduced the SIZE of the building, which has been the chief complaint all along. As I've said previously, the M.V. Commission will just guide this project along until there are enough votes to approve a 30,000 sf store in the worst location of all on Martha's Vineyard. What really puzzles me is why the Selectmen did this when Tristan Israel was out of town. Shame on the Commission if they approve this. I hope it backfires.

Instead of engaging in extortion of epic proportions, how about Stop and Shop build their store where the Post Office and Cumberland Farms and the former Tisbury fire station are currently located and move the post office and Cumberland Farms into the current Stop and Shop is?

Extortion and selling out and losing all credibility and being an embarrassment to the whole island is what this is about! Sounds like Stop & Shop will now own Tisbury! It's unbelievable and disgusting what has happened! All because Tisbury needs a supermarket?? Put it somewhere else....and no one would have to be "BOuGHT!"